Land Reform in New China

When New China was founded, the newly liberated areas, with more than half the country's population, had not yet carried out land reform, and the peasants were still bound by the feudal land system. In old China, landlords and rich peasants, under 10 percent of the rural population, held 70 to 80 percent of the land, while poor peasants, hired hands and middle peasants, over 90 percent of the rural population, owned only 20 to 30 percent. To free rural productive forces and develop agriculture, in June 1950 the Central People's Government promulgated the Land Reform Law of the People's Republic of China, which abolished the landlord class's feudal exploitative land ownership and established peasant land ownership. The general line of land reform was to rely on poor peasants and hired hands, unite with middle peasants, neutralize rich peasants, and eliminate the feudal system of exploitation step by step and in a differentiated way, in order to develop agricultural production. From winter 1950 land reform was carried out in the new liberated areas in stages, confiscating landlords' land, draft animals, farm tools, surplus housing and grain and distributing them to landless and land-poor peasants. By the end of 1952, except for some ethnic minority areas, land reform was essentially complete on the mainland: about 300 million landless and land-poor peasants received about 700 million mu of land and other means of production, and were freed from paying landlords some 35 billion kilograms of grain in heavy rent each year. Land reform destroyed the feudal land system that had lasted over 2,000 years, eliminated the landlord class, made peasants true masters of their own fate, liberated rural productive forces, and sped the recovery of agriculture, creating conditions for industrialization and socialist construction.